Amherst College - Bishophttps://www.amherst.edu/taxonomy/term/9202
enThe Champhttps://www.amherst.edu/amherst-story/magazine/issues/2009winter/collegerow/jeopardy/node/96199
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="mediainline"><span class="inline"></span><table class="table-align-right-gradient" border="0" cellpadding="10" cellspacing="10"><tbody><tr><td><div class="mediainline"><span class="inline"><img class="image original" src="/media/view/95906/original/137580010_w.jpg" border="0" width="200" height="300" alt="image"></span></div><div class="fine-print" align="center">Ben Bishop '09</div></td></tr></tbody></table><span class="fine-print">By Emily Gold Boutilier</span></div><p><span class="drop-cap2">B</span>en Bishop ’09 is not the first Amherst student to appear on <i>Jeopardy!</i>. Ann Danielson ’91 and Gwyneth Connell ’00 each took part in the annual College Championship. Several alumni have competed on the show, too—notably the author and attorney Scott Turow ’70, who demolished Paul Shaffer and Susan Lucci on Celebrity <i>Jeopardy! </i>in 2006. <br><br>But few <i>Jeopardy!</i> winners—from anywhere—have had a better run than Bishop. In December, the economics major and co-captain of the men’s squash team won four games before meeting defeat in the fifth. His $115,800 (pre-tax) total was the highest won by any contestant in 2008.<br><br>Bishop has been a <i>Jeopardy!</i> fan since his first year at Amherst, when he watched nightly with friends in Stearns Dorm. Twice, he took the online test to qualify as a contestant, and on his second attempt, he did well enough to make it to a try-out in Boston.<br><br>In October 2008, he flew to California to begin filming at Sony Pictures Studio in Culver City. One of the first answers on the board was about the cotton trade—great news for Bishop, who’d written a 40-page paper about cotton for a Special Topics course he took with Jan Dizard, the Charles Hamilton Houston Professor in American Culture. “It was a running joke,” Bishop says, “that the dream question I would get on <i>Jeopardy!</i> would be about cotton.” <br><br>Emerging as the new champion, he changed his shirt (to keep up the charade that each show is taped on a different day) and returned to film the day’s three remaining episodes. At one point in his fourth match, Bishop, who’s taken courses in at least 18 departments at Amherst, mistakenly added the word <i>the</i> to the title of Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” But the slip-up was inconsequential; he didn’t once lose the lead that game. In Final Jeopardy!, he correctly named Corsica as the island that France bought from Genoa on May 15, 1768. Bishop walked out of the studio that day to back-patting and cheers. <br><br>The next day, the ride came to an end when Bishop, in second place going into Final Jeopardy!, didn’t know that Barbra Streisand was the only woman to win a Golden Globe for directing. His loss, though, was nothing tragic: Bishop had done well enough to make it to the next Tournament of Champions, which will air in March.</p><p>The Seattle native hasn’t decided what to do with the money, which he expects to receive in April, but he’s already treated his roommates to dinner at the Amherst Brewing Company. When the episodes aired in December, he got e-mail from old friends and teachers. Strangers stopped him on campus to say they were rooting for him. Bishop also attracted an online following. At www.amerst.com, for example, someone posted the comment, “He looks a lot like actors Channing Tatum and Chris Evans.” Another anonymous poster, writing on the <i>Seattle Times</i> Web site, gushed, “I speak for many when I say that he has reaffirmed our hope that smart, attractive men exist. Viewing parties are already planned for his appearance on the Tournament of Champions—now if we could just figure out how to get him to stop by for a guest appearance at the party…”</p><p> </p><p>Click <a href="/news/campusbuzz/node/83977">here</a> for a video clip of Bishop on <i>Jeopardy! </i>and to read an interview with Bishop by fellow <i>Jeopardy! </i>veteran Katherine Duke '05.</p><p><span class="fine-print">Photo by Samuel Masinter '04.</span></p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/3159">jeopardy</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9202">Bishop</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9203">Ben Bishop</a></div></div></div>Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:55:22 +0000kdduke96199 at https://www.amherst.eduhttps://www.amherst.edu/amherst-story/magazine/issues/2009winter/collegerow/jeopardy/node/96199#commentsBen Bishop ’09 Answers: What Is Jeopardy!?https://www.amherst.edu/news/archives/campusbuzz/node/83977
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="fine-print">Interview by Katherine Duke '05</p>
<p><span class="drop-cap2">S</span>ince its first, black-and-white incarnation, created by Merv Griffin in the early 1960s, <i>Jeopardy!</i> has built a reputation as the thinking person&rsquo;s game show. Amherst has helped prepare many trivia geeks to do battle with the big blue board: As a senior, Gwyneth Connell &rsquo;00 represented the Jeffs in the 2000 College Championship. Novelist and attorney Scott Turow &rsquo;70 towered over the competition in <i>Celebrity Jeopardy!</i> in 2006. And even though I ultimately came in a distant third, I consider my own <i>Jeopardy!</i> game, which aired in April 2008, among the luckiest and most fascinating experiences of my life.</p>
<!--break-->
<p>When Ben Bishop &rsquo;09, an economics major and co-captain of the Amherst squash team, found out that he had been chosen for the show, he dropped by my office to get tips from a veteran. I lent him<i> Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs</i> by 74-time <i>Jeopardy!</i> champion Ken Jennings. After Bishop&rsquo;s tapings in October 2008, he came by again. &ldquo;How did it go?&rdquo; I asked. Sworn to secrecy about the outcome, he said only, &ldquo;It was fun.&rdquo;</p>
<div id="container"><a href="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">Get the Flash Player</a> to see this player.</div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.ats.amherst.edu/flashvideo/swfobject.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var s1 = new SWFObject("http://www.ats.amherst.edu/flashvideo/mediaplayer.swf","mediaplayer","320","240","7");
s1.addParam("allowfullscreen","true");
s1.addVariable("width","320");
s1.addVariable("height","240");
s1.addVariable("file","http://www.ats.amherst.edu/flashvideo/studentvids/bishop.flv");
s1.addVariable("image","http://www.ats.amherst.edu/flashvideo/studentvids/bishop.jpg");
s1.write("container");
</script>
<p>In early December, millions of viewers found out exactly how it went: The 21-year-old Seattle native competed on five episodes and won four of them. His $115,800 total is the highest earned by any contestant so far this year, which means that he&rsquo;s headed to Las Vegas in January 2009 for the Tournament of Champions, where he&rsquo;ll try for another $250,000. &ldquo;Fun,&rdquo; indeed.</p>
<p>I sat down with Bishop to learn more about his rise to game show stardom. I did not require him to phrase each answer in the form of a question. Here is what he had to say:</p><h5>Campus buzzing</h5><p>&ldquo;For four or five days before I was on the show, I was reading the almanac. I was reading stuff that I knew that I <i>knew</i>, but I just wanted to make sure that I had the names correct, and things where I knew a couple different people that I wanted to separate my mind, [such as] the difference between Cezanne and Gauguin. My roommates helped out a lot. Garrett [Snedeker &lsquo;09] put together a summary of 1960s-through-1980s sitcoms&mdash;something that I know nothing about. I borrowed a buzzer from the Amherst Quiz Bowl team to practice ringing in.&rdquo;</p><h5>Behind the scenes</h5><p>&ldquo;Everyone [on the <i>Jeopardy!</i> crew] was really nice; that helped. [The contestant coordinators] deal with new, nervous contestants every week, so they&rsquo;re good at lightening the mood. The other contestants are just as happy to be there as you are. There&rsquo;s a three- or four-hour orientation in the morning, so everyone gets to be nice and friendly&mdash;and then they try to beat each other up, onstage.</p><p>&ldquo;I was impressed at how good [host Alex Trebek] is at his job. He does make a few errors, reading the clues, which they go back and re-record. But he&rsquo;s very good with the interviews, and during the commercials, he entertains the crowd. You get the idea that he&rsquo;s pretty smart and that he&rsquo;s genuinely interested in the material. He seems like he&rsquo;s not just doing it to make the money.&rdquo;</p><h5>On the board</h5><p>&ldquo;On my first show, one of the first questions was about [the trade of] cotton, and that&rsquo;s one of my big academic interests; I did a Special Topics [course] on it. It was sort of a running joke, before the show, that I would get a question about cotton. And it was, like, the third question, so that really helped settle me down. The other running joke was that I would get geography categories, and then, in the first show, in Double Jeopardy, I got <i>two </i>geography categories. Once those came out, I was pretty sure that I had a good chance of winning.</p><p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s funny: I took Astronomy 11 last semester, and there was a category about stars, and for the $1,000 or $2,000 clue, the answer was <i>nebula</i>, and I remembered [Professor of Astronomy George Greenstein] showing us pictures and talking about them in class. There was a [Final Jeopardy] question straight out of <i>Brainiac</i>. <i>[The clue was: &ldquo;The first and middle names of this breakfast cereal &lsquo;spokesman&rsquo; are Horatio Magellan.&rdquo; See the answer at the end of this article.]</i></p><p>&ldquo;The things that I ought to be good at, I probably am not: pop culture and movies and TV. All my friends from home made fun of me for getting an Angelina Jolie question wrong. I missed a couple of sports questions early in my first episode.&rdquo;</p><h5>The competition</h5><p>&ldquo;I felt sort of bad; I think [the other contestants] were intimidated by me, and it was weird for me to be inspiring such fear. After my first two shows, we went and ate lunch, and they were all giving me this stare from afar. But they were all pretty nice people.&rdquo;</p><h5>On the money</h5><p>&ldquo;The money isn&rsquo;t real to me yet. First of all, they won&rsquo;t pay me until 120 days after the show airs. And when you&rsquo;re playing the game, you don&rsquo;t really think of it like money&mdash;it&rsquo;s just points. I wagered pretty aggressively throughout the show. Obviously, if somebody said, &ldquo;Hey, I&rsquo;ve got a question for you about the names of countries. Would you be willing to bet $20,000 that you know the right answer?&rdquo; No, I probably wouldn&rsquo;t. But that&rsquo;s not how I think about it&mdash;it&rsquo;s just points to help me win the game. I haven&rsquo;t really thought about how to spend the money yet.&rdquo;</p><p><i>[The answer to the clue above: Who is Cap&rsquo;n Crunch?]</i></p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/114">Katherine Duke</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/116">Duke</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/454">TV</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1122">trivia</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1248">television</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/3159">jeopardy</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4523">scott turow</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4578">gwyneth connell</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9202">Bishop</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9203">Ben Bishop</a></div></div></div>Thu, 11 Dec 2008 20:15:00 +0000kdduke83977 at https://www.amherst.eduhttps://www.amherst.edu/news/archives/campusbuzz/node/83977#comments